# [snatched from http://fusionanomaly.net/opensourceculture.html]

In the past 100 years as these super technologies have been developed in 
the west... the smashing of atoms, the invention of radio, televsion, 
computers, immunology, so forth and so on... data has been arriving about 
the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet... that they 
dissolve ordinary realities , ordinary cultural values, through an 
interaction, a symbiosis , a relationship to local plants, that perturb 
brain chemistry. and in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry, the 
cultural operating system is wiped clean and something older, even for 
these people, something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the 
animal soul, replaces it. replaces it. replaces the cultural operating 
system. something not determined by history and geography but something 
writ in the language of the flesh itself. this is who you are. this is 
true nakedness. you are not naked when you take off your clothes. you 
still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your 
allusions, your delusions. when you shed the cultural operating system, 
then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche. 
Desmond Morris called it 'the naked ape'. and it's from THAT position. a 
position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask 
real questions about what does it mean to be human, what kind of 
circumstance are we caught in, and what kind of structures, if any, can we 
put in place, to assuage the pain and accentuate the glory and the wonder 
that lurks waiting for us in this very narrow slice of time between the 
birth canal and the yawning grave. in other words, we have to return to 
first premises. 

so i've been thinking about this a lot, and at first it seemed only to me 
only a metaphor. this phrase 'culture is your operating system'. but 
because i travel around a lot and get that jolting experience frequently, 
of let's say leaving London on a foggy evening and arriving in 
Johannesberg 14 hours later to sweltering day in a city of 14 million on 
the brink anarchy... i get to change my OS frequently. and so i notice the 
relativity of these systems. and some work for some things and some for 
others... for instance if you are a positivist. if you are running 
'positivism 4.0' you can't support UFO 's. positivism 4.0 does not support 
ufo's. if on the other hand you're running [?] 5.1 as your OS, ufo's and a 
number of other things can get in through the door. that is what we would 
technically say is a more tolerant OS. or its plug-in supports special 
effects denied to the positivists. well it's fun to think this way because 
it shows you that you... you don't have to be a victim of your culture. 
it's not like your eye color or your height or your gender. it's fragile. 
it can be remade. if you wish it to be. and then the question is well, how 
does one download a new OS? well first of all you have to clear some space 
on your disk. the best way to do this is probably with a pharmacological 
agent. you think of some while i have a drink of water .

psilocybin is an excellent disk cleaner. you can put a lot of things in 
the trash and just disappear with a psilocybin upgrade. other 
pharmacological agents that will clear your disk are ayahuasca. and of 
course, these are gentle clearing of the disk which take 5, 6, 7 hours. if 
you are in a hurry to dump that old data and leap right into the new 
operation system, click on the button marked ' dimethyltriptamine '. a 
compressed disk erasure will immediately be downloaded, unstuffed, 
bin-hexed, implemented, installed, run and you will find yourself with an 
entirely different head. 

now, shamans have always known, though they may not have used the kind of 
language i'm using here... shamans have always knowed this trick. what 
trick? it has two facets. first of all, that culture is an operation 
system. that's all it is. and that the operating system can be wiped out 
and replaced by something else. so essentially, what's going on among 
shamans and those who resort to them for curing and counseling and so 
forth... is a slightly more advanced operating system than the customer. 
the shaman is in possession of certain facts. about plants, about animals, 
about healing, about human psychology, about the local geography, about 
mojo of many different sorts, that the client is not aware of... the 
client is 'culture-lite'. the shaman paid for the registered and licensed 
version of the software and is running a much heavier version of the 
software than the client. i think we should all aspire to make this 
upgrade. it's very important that you have all the bells & whistles on 
your OS, otherwise somebody is going to get a leg up on you. well, what's 
wrong with the OS that we have? consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is. 
well, it's DUMB. it's retro. it's very non-competitive. it's messy. it 
wastes the environment, it wastes human sources, it's inefficient, it runs 
on stereotypes, it runs on a low sampling rate which is what creates 
stereotypes, low sample rates make everybody appear alike, when in fact 
the glory is in everyone's differences... and the current OS is flawed. it 
actually has bugs in it. that generate contradictions. contradictions such 
as we're cutting the earth beneath our own feet. we're poisoning the 
atmosphere that we breathe. this is not intelligent behavior. this is a 
culture with a bug in its OS that's making it produce erratic, 
dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior. time to call the techs. and who are 
the techs? the shaman are the techs. so i think you get the idea. very 
important to upgrade your OS by dumping obsolete cultural subroutines. 
they are simply taking up disk space. they are not advancing you in any 
way whatsoever. 

now, a very large group of people who followed this advice, and rebuilt 
their OS in the 1960's, went on then to build this most amazing of all 
cultural artifacts. the internet . the internet is light at the end of the 
tunnel . i don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, i don't 
care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. ANYTHING can be 
trivialized. the important point is that it is levelling the playing field 
of global society. it is creating defacto, an entirely new set of 
political realities . none of the constipated oligarchic structures that 
are resisting this were ever asked. their greed betrayed them into 
investing in this in the first place. without ever fully grasping what the 
implications of it were for their larger agenda. the internet basically 
means you can now be free as you are motivated to be. as free as you dare 
to be .Tim Leary , years ago, it was something he used to say that never 
got quoted as much as 'turn on tune in drop out' but it seemed to me, it 
was maybe better advice. he used to say 'find the others, find the 
others'. well, if you're a gay kid in Fargo, North Dakota, if you're a 
mescaline enthusiast in Winnipeg, if you're a student of alchemy in 
moosejaw, community is pretty much out of reach for you. or it was, until 
the coming of the internet. and the internet introduces everybody no 
matter how weird, how marginalized, no matter how perculiar, to the fact 
that there are OTHERS LIKE YOU. that there are others like you. find the 
others. make common cause. realize that it's the deals you cut, and the 
friends you make, that determine where you're going to be standing when 
the flash hits. 

[...] 

so culture plays a game of simplification. if you can make people think 
alike, they will buy alike, they will worship alike, and if you know, if 
politics demands it, they will KILL alike. so the uniformatarian agenda of 
culture is not an agenda friendly to you, or to me, or to any other 
individual. and if you start out from that point of view, you will soon 
realize that culture is NOT your friend. now this is not exactly PC to 
say. what with everybody running around recovering their Latvian roots and 
their Irishness and whatever. culture is NOT your friend. if you define 
yourself as a member of a group, of any group, know that that is a gross 
simplification and that everything about you that is interesting and 
unique is betrayed by defining yourself in that way. 

-Terence McKenna - _Light Of 3rd Millenium - Austin_ (20k) (82:15)